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"Leave safety behind. Put your body on the line. Stand before the people you fear and speak your mind - even if your voice shakes. When you least expect it, someone may actually listen to what you have to say. Well-aimed slingshots can topple giants. And do your homework." . Maggie Kuhn

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker

"Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow ... money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands" - Abraham Lincoln

It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.-John Steinbeck

Ramona used to write nice feature pieces for newspapers and magazines, along with columns that, yes, got testy once in a while (Ronald Reagan was president. What could she do?) but were basically and overall nice.

Note: Thanks to Alan Colmes, I am now a regular contributor on his website, Liberaland. He posted this piece this morning, so if you're interested in reading the complete piece it continues over there. Thanks.

In the next town over from us the recycling station is in a huge semi-trailer. You have to climb six narrow metal steps to get up into it, but there is an aisle you can walk down and there are huge open boxes in which to throw your stuff.

Leaving aside the usual suspects--the terrorist factions round the world, the seething Middle East mountain and desert folk--who are President Obama's worst enemies? The Republicans who saw it as their mission to keep him from winning a second term but failed? Those 30 members of the House and the Tea Party now holding the country hostage over an already approved health care plan nicknamed after this president? The Religious Righteous? The far Left disillusioned? The whites-only-as-long-as-they're-not-women crowd?

Have you read this? Charles Pierce is a genius at grabbing the god-awful truth and shining bright lights on it. His latest Esquire piece, "The Reign of Morons is Here", is pure Charlie--raging, brilliant, and, of course, spot on:

When 19-year-old Andrew Anderson started working at the Goodwill store in East Naples, Florida, he thought his job was pretty cool. He was working in a place where poor and low-income people came to buy the things they couldn't afford anywhere else.

"It makes you feel amazing," he said, "makes you feel you can actually be the person to help them."

Yesterday the Republicans in the House voted to slash 40 billion dollars in annual food stamp (SNAP) coverage over 10 years, putting some 3.8 million poor people in jeopardy of losing their pitiful but essential pennies-a-day government food support. (There are some 47 million people at the poverty level here in the United States. A shameful fact that should point out the absolute need to keep the SNAP program alive rather th

WHEN asked to explain why he was running for a seat in the Australian Senate while holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, Julian Assange quoted Plato: “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.”

Plato was “a bit of a fascist,” he said, but had a point.

Imagine the chagrin Mr. Assange must feel now, given that not only did he fail to win a place in the Senate in the recent election, but he was less successful than Ricky Muir from the Motoring Enthusiasts Party. Mr. Muir, who won just 0.5 percent of the vote, is most famous for having posted a video on YouTube of himself having a kangaroo feces fight with friends.

It was a long weekend and I was devilishly busy and exhausted to the point of just plain weary, so you'll have to forgive me if I didn't get this right:

I read today that on September 27, 2010--almost three years ago--Julian Assange of Wikileaks fame checked a bag at an airport in Sweden containing three laptops filled with Wikileaks stuff, including some top secret "war crimes" information that, if it hadn't been stolen by some shady government dudes, would have knocked our socks off with revelations of dirty deeds so devastating, if they had ever, ever been revealed, the world as we know it might just stop spinning. Or heads would roll. Or Assange would be hailed as the hero he fancied he already was. Whatever. Something BIG would happen if ever those revelations saw the light of day. So, of course, they were stolen by one or more shadowy government dudes who were not about to let that happen.

Note: Labor Day weekend is here once again, and let's enjoy it while we can. I have a feeling, if things keep going this way, anything that smacks of celebrating labor in this country will disappear.

I guess you've heard that Michigan, my Michigan has become a Right-to-Work state? Who would have dreamed it would ever happen to Michigan? Are businesses flocking to our border now, wanting to take advantage of cheap, unprotected labor? Do I even have to answer that? (I'm throwing this in because I'm still so mad about the whole damned thing. I may throw it in many more times in future posts. Because I'll never stop being mad about the whole damned thing.)

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A comment on the article from Martin in New York: "Telling that Ms. Dowd compares Clinton to Brady, since she talks about politics strictly as if it were a game, without impact on people's lives. And taunting Biden with what she imagines are his son's wishes is just tasteless--but I guess there's really no room for decency, or ideas, in politics anymore."

The Saudi-registered Embraer Phenom 300 jet was attempting to land at Blackbushe airport..when it crashed.....it was carrying three relatives of Osama Bin Laden. They were named as Rajaa Hashim, Osama’s stepmother; Sana Bin Laden, his half-sister, and her husband Zuhair Hashim....It is the third time members of the Bin Laden family have been killed in a plane crash. Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s father, was killed when his Beechcraft 18 crashed in Saudi Arabia in 1967 while on his way to marry his 23rd wife. Salem bin Laden, the half-brother of Osama, died in 1988 when his aircraft drifted into high-voltage power lines in San Antonio, Texas.

Videos have provided “corroboration of what African-Americans have been saying for years,” said Paul Butler, a professor at Georgetown University Law School and a former prosecutor, who called them “the C-Span of the streets.” On Thursday, the family of Samuel DuBose, an unarmed black man who was shot to death by a University of Cincinnati police officer on July 19, said the officer would never have been prosecuted if his actions had not been captured by the body camera the officer was wearing...The proliferation of video has coincided with a paradox: Public views of the police have grown worse, yet experts say police use of force has probably been lower in the last few years than in generations.

Firedoglake is going to change. It sounds like Jane is hanging up her boxing gloves. She has had several major health issues that she has survived. The latest was a hip replacement.

As many of you know, Firedoglake has been on hiatus for eight months while I recovered from hip replacement surgery. During that time I’ve been contemplating what the next chapter should be for the website. After some personal reflection, I have decided to pass the torch on to Kevin Gosztola and Brian Sonenstein, who will launch their own media organization called Shadowproof that will build on the success of FDL.

Steven Rosenfield takes a look at the media's lack of understanding with the current political mood.

But there is one explanation you won’t find among the politicos who are parsing the interior numbers in polls—such as the negative approval ratings, or appeal by race and gender. That explanation is that the political spectrum is changing, or stretching toward its blunter extremes, which also accounts for the muted enthusiasm for both party's leading establishment candidates, Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.

A shifting electorate is the last thing many pundits want to confront.